Welcome Spring! Jumbo Cookies

Shortly after making the St. Patrick's Day jumbo chocolate chip cookies, I decided they would be the perfect snack for my stamping workshop. I got these all made and ready, and then had to cancel the workshop.

I used an image from Stampin' Up! for the chick in the egg. It's fun to use the transfer technique using decorating gel with any king of image. I need to practice my writing technique. Thanks for stopping by!

Happy St. Patrick's Day Cookie

It's a little late, but this is a jumbo cookie that I made for the boys for St. Patrick's Day. I am having way too much fun with me new cake decorating skills. The perpetual supply of buttercream isn't such a good thing. I need to strengthen my will power against it.

One recipe of my chocolate chip cookie dough makes two of these jumbo cookies. We took one for my oldest son's kindergarten teacher on St. Patrick's Day. She thought it was great, and he was excited to give it to her. Thanks for stopping by!

"16" Birthday Cake

A friend of mine saw my final cake--or at least the remnants of it--after I had taken it to the church office to get rid of the rest of it. (You can see it in yesterday's post.) Her son's 16th birthday was coming up, and she was thinking of doing a special cake for it. She asked me if I'd be interested, and I said, "Sure!"

They decided they would like a "16" shaped cake.  I started out with two 11x15 cakes made with 1 1/2 cake mixes each. The "1" is to have Oreo cream filling, and the "6" is to have buttercream filling. I probably could have done this with two 9x13 cakes and had enough servings, but I didn't want to be too small, and I wasn't sure how much cake I'd have to carve out to make the numbers.

 

I put this in the fridge to chill around 5pm and got it out around 12:30a to carve. I made a big "16" using a cool italic font on the computer, and then blew it up huge to the same size as my cake. I then used that as a pattern to carve my cake. You can see my templates and the excess cake that I cut away. There's a yummy use for cake scraps that I'll have to tell you about some other time.

So after carving the numbers, I decided they would be easier to ice if they were separated. I put them on two trays and iced them separately. Here they are with their crumb coats on. These chilled until the next evening when I decorated them with lime green and royal blue stripes. It was quite a job to get them on one board and completely decorated on the sides of the cakes against each other. Fun, fun!!  
 

Thanks for stopping by!

Lindley's Birthday Cake

I've been telling you about the preparations for this cake for two days. Today, I'm finally showing you the whole cake! The cake itself was pretty simple. The birthday girl requested vanilla cake with vanilla icing--even though I was fully prepared to make something coconut or pineapple inspired for the "Aloha!" theme.  Mmm, maybe I'll make something here at home like that just for me.

At any rate, here's the final cake for you to see.  The color flow pieces dried flat--not curved, so they aren't flush against the side of the cake.  Note to self: Dry sugar plaques on drying forms or only put them on the flat top of cakes from now on.

The flip flops are pretty cute, I think. Since they worked out well, I had two extra pair, so I sent them along with the cake for the girls to enjoy at the party. Lindley's mom said the first thing Lindley said to every girl that came in the door was, "Look at my cake!" She was very pleased with it, and that made me happy. Thanks for stopping by!

Sugar Cookie Flip Flops

In yesterday's post I told you about a special birthday cake I made last week. In addition to it being an "Aloha!" themed cake, I found that flip flops were going to be involved. Her mom mentioned to me that the girls were going to be decorating their own flip flops at the party. Since I hadn't found much inspiration for a young girl's "Aloha!" party, flip flops seemed like better inspiration to me.  I went about looking for flip flop cakes. You would be surprised how many are out there!

I haven't learned how to use gum paste or fondant yet, or else maybe I would have used that to make flip flops instead. Or maybe I would have made big hibiscus flowers and never even thought about flip flops, but it's too late for that now.

I do know cookies! In fact, I decided to use a new roll out sugar cookie recipe that I just tried and posted about here. I traced around an old pair of my son's flip flops to get a pattern. I shrunk it a little to fit on my cake, cut it from cardstock and then traced around it with a knife in the sugar cookie dough. I made three pairs just in case something didn't work right, a little boy stuck his finger in one, the dog took a bite while I was picking my kid up at school, etc. Before baking, I used a drinking straw to make holes where I wanted to insert the licorice thongs later.

They turned out surprisingly well! I used scissors to trim the licorice pieces, using some royal icing for glue.  Then I flooded/covered them with color flow icing.  I knew it would give the smooth finish I wanted, and I wanted to use my extra up from class.  I didn't want it to go to waste, and I didn't have any other uses for it in mind. Stop by tomorrow to see the finished cake! Thanks for stopping by!

Dairy Queen Birthday Cake

My parents always come to visit in February, and while they're here, we celebrate my birthday. Since there have been so many cakes and cupcakes around here lately--a consequence of my cake decorating classes--they decided to take my two boys to Dairy Queen to pick out an ice cream cake for my birthday. I thought it was a pretty nifty idea the way they used ice cream cones on it, so I decided to share it here with you all. Thanks for stopping by!

Windowpane Hearts--or whatevers

My oldest son wanted to make these Windowpane Heart cookies from Family Fun for Valentine's Day. I told him we would, but with the school Valentine's Day party and his grandparents visiting last weekend, we made them after Valentine's Day. Consequently, we decided not to make them heart-shaped, but used different cookie cutters instead.

I mixed them up on Saturday thinking that they would be fun to make with Grammy, but the weekend got busy, and we didn't get to it. The dough was in the fridge waiting for us, so we made them this afternoon after the grandparents left to go home. We were stuck indoors watching it snow, so it was a good snowy day activity.

The boys had fun helping to roll out the dough, and it wasn't messy, because the recipe tells you to roll it between two layers of waxed paper. I DO NOT enjoy making cut out cookies, but this was the best cut out cookie recipe I have used to date. I am pretty sure I will use it again to make normal cut out cookies to decorate with icing.

What makes this recipe special is that you bake the cookies on aluminum foil and fill the cut out centers with hard candy. Similar to the Family Fun recipe, we used Jolly Ranchers. The pieces were too big for our small openings, so I used a heavy knife to "whack" the pieces into halves on a cutting board. The boys liked dropping the pieces of candy into the little holes in the cookies too.

I can not even begin to tell you how pleased I am with the way these turned out. I did not have high hopes for them turning out anywhere near as pretty as the Family Fun shows them, but ours did! Yay! It's the little things in life, isn't it? The boys had fun and were so surprised at what they looked like when they came out of the oven. It was a fun baking day with the boys. Thanks for stopping by!

Kindergarten Valentine Party Crafts

These will be posted over on my stamping blog tomorrow, because these are craft-related.  However, they use food, so I decided to share them here on the cooking blog too, even though they're not cooked or baked.  Enjoy!

I planned the crafts for last week's kindergarten Valentine's Day party, and I wanted to share them with you.  It makes me happy.

 

The first project was a Jolly Lolly from the Family Fun website.  I made lots of mustaches and kissing lips out of craft foam for the kiddos to choose from.  Of course, there were black, brown and blonde mustaches along with bright red, pink and fuschia lips for all tastes.  I had them all cut out with the holes punched so the kids just chose the "mask" and slid it onto a lollipop stick.  Then, I printed mailing labels, one for each child, that said, "Happy Valentine's Day! Love, (insert name here)"  That also made it easy to tell who had made the craft and who hadn't based on whose names were still left on the sheet of labels.

Next, the kids made these little Candy Airplanes, also from Family Fun. I bought cheap valentines stickers for the kids to use to decorate the stick of gum. Then, they assembled the biplane with help from the parents and aides at the party. I had the candy and rubberband in individual baggies for each child. Once they built the plane, they put it back in the baggie and affixed another mailing label that I printed to say, "Valentine, you make my heart soar!" with little biplane cliparts on each side.

The kids all seemed like they had lots of fun making these cute valentines to take home and give to parents, siblings, grandparents, whoever. Thanks for stopping by!

Happy Groundhog Day!

Happy Groundhog Day!

Aquarium Birthday Cake

I mentioned yesterday that my oldest son's birthday was Friday. He got a small aquarium for his birthday. To continue the theme, I made this cake for him. He really likes Swedish fish, so that was an added bonus. Thanks for stopping by!

'10 Birthday Cupcakes

Yesterday was my oldest son's 6th birthday. He wanted me to bring cupcakes in for his class. We talked about what kind of cupcakes he wanted, and how he wanted them decorated. He got a red gumball machine for Christmas. He really likes it, and we decided to put gumball machines on his cupcakes.

I used a plastic milk jug cap to make a circular imprint in the white buttercream icing. Then I traced the imprint with the light blue icing for the globe of the gumball machine. The rest is just free-handed. The kids really liked them and thought the gumball machines were cute. Thanks for stopping by!

Quick and Easy Fudge

Jim's dad's birthday was over the weekend. He likes fudge, so last week I whipped up a batch of this easy fudge for him. Believe it or not, this recipe is from my high school freshman home economics class. My grandfather loved this recipe, and I used to make it for him all the time. Enjoy!

Quick and Easy Fudge

1 c. butter
1 c. creamy peanut butter
1/4 c. cocoa
2 T. vanilla
1 lb. conf. sugar

Melt butter and peanut butter in a large pot over medium heat. Remove from heat and add cocoa and vanilla. Add sugar one cup at a time and stir until smooth. Press into a square baking dish and let set until cooled. You can put it in the refrigerator to speed up the process so you can eat it sooner!

Thanks for stopping by!

Fall Fling Food

Happy Halloween!

Every year on Halloween night, our church, Wilkinson Church of Christ, hosts a huge community party called Fall Fling. We fill the church with carnival games for kids of all ages, inflatables, face painting, etc. We serve a small dinner for the kids coming through too.

I've never been a part of planning the food before, but our children's pastor asked me if I would be willing to co-chair it this year with another lady who has planned it before. I thought it sounded like a challenge, so I accepted. My job, thus far, has been to plan the groceries and gather the donations needed to make food for the 400 people we have planned for.

We started the planning a few weeks ago. I started searching for festive food to serve on the Family Fun website, keeping in mind that whatever we chose would have to be made in massive quantities. We ended up choosing the following two main dishes:

Pizza Mummies

Worms on a Bun
(I just finished cutting 25 lbs.,
200 hot dogs, into 9 worms each!)

Along with those two main dishes, we will be serving orange and black nacho chips with cheese and the following festive cookies for dessert:

Fudge Stripe Witch's Hats
(See yesterday's post for a picture of mine.
I made 311 of these!)

Nutter Butter Ghosts
(See yesterday's post for a picture of mine.
I made 318 of these.)

We always hand out Popcorn Witch's Hands to the kids too.

I've seen the cookie and popcorn hands all over the web, so I have no idea who to attribute the original ideas to.

I made the cookies yesterday, and cut the hot dogs this morning to prepare them for the Worms on a Bun. I hope this all comes together well tonight! Thanks for stopping by!

Fall Fling Sneak Peeks

These...


...and these were my project for the day.


Come back tomorrow to read more. Thanks for stopping by!

Homemade Pizza Dough

The boys and I have made this Homemade Pizza Dough recipe twice now in the past few weeks. They have had a blast making their own pizzas. One day, they even got their Daddy to show them his expertise. He worked at Little Caesar's for a few years when we were in high school.

The second time we made it, I substituted some whole wheat flour for the regular flour. I wanted to make it just a bit healthier. It turned out great both times, and it is super easy! Thanks for stopping by!

Watermelon Pops... ...sort of

A few weeks ago, I was looking for watermelon recipes. I wanted something watermelon-themed for a stamping workshop snack. I came across this recipe for Watermelon Pops on the Kraft Foods website. I didn't make them for the workshop, but I saved the recipe for the boys and I to try someday.


We made them this week--sort of. We didn't add the mini chocolate chips, and we didn't use lime jello for the top layer, so ours don't look like watermelons at all, but they're still tasty. We used orange on the top layer instead, so they're a strawberry/orange fruity frozen snack. They're not bad, but I don't know that we'll make them again. The boys just don't have a sweet tooth or big appetite for ice cream and/or frozen novelties, so it's hard to tell how long these will remain in my freezer. Thanks for stopping by!

Father's Day Cake

One of the special things the boys and I did for Jim for Father's Day was to bake him a cake. I've seen those 9x13 cakes made up to look like a dress shirt and tie, so we did something similar. We made him one to look like a football official's shirt--or at least something close to it! I am by no means a great cake decorator, but I took some lessons as a kid in 4H. It's enough to get me by on some cakes for our family's special days.


A few weeks ago, we bought a cake to take to some friends' place while we were on vacation. It was a sheet cake, but they had split it in half and put a layer of icing in between. I've never seen that done to a 9x13 cake before. I decided to try it. We made a chocolate cake and put an Oreo cookie cream filling inside--to keep with the black and white theme, of course!

The cake tasted fantastic, and the decorating was ok. It's hard to get nice straight stripes! I had black decorator's dye here, so I was able to get a pretty dark gray icing for the shirt. I had it all finished and in the basement fridge. In the afternoon, the boys were playing in the basement. My 2-year old decided to "play" in the cake instead. There were little tiny finger holes poked all through the bottom of the shirt! I guess that was his way of adding his signature to the gift. Thanks for stopping by!

Steamwhistle Hot Dogs

These Steamwhistle Hot Dogs were a quick lunch after church Sunday afternoon. No, I don't need a recipe to make hot dogs, but these made something a little more special and tasty than just plain old hot dogs. Give them a try! Thanks for stopping by!

Umbrella Cookies

Posting about the Rabbit Cookies last week reminded me of when we made the snack last year during "U" week at preschool. I couldn't come up with anything except for umbrellas! Coincidentally, that was the theme of the week. They had patio umbrellas set up in the room and children's umbrellas hanging upside-down from the ceiling for a paper toss game. So our Umbrella Cookies were a hit! Preschool is so much fun--for Mommy too! Thanks for stopping by!

Rabbit Cookies

It's time for another installment of fun baking on the Cookin' with Melissa blog.


My son was snack leader one day this week at preschool. It was "R" week, and he thought we should make Rabbit Cookies. I was skeptical that we could come up with such a thing. I did some research and found an answer online. As usual, the creative people at Family Fun created a way to make Easter Bunny Cupcakes. We only do cupcakes at preschool on birthdays, so I adjusted the recipe to make them into Rabbit Cookies. He loved them, and we had a great time chatting while we made them. Thanks for stopping by!